I provide psychotherapy for those, like myself, living with diabetes and the families who carry it with them. I work with teenagers and adults. 

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Diabetes is rarely just a matter of insulin and numbers. It reshapes how a person eats, travels, sleeps, and imagines the future. It can quietly redraw one's very sense of self, until "I am diabetic" begins to speak louder than student, parent, spouse, or friend. The A1c tells us how the body is coping; it says nothing of how the person is coping.

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Much of the suffering I see in this work goes unnamed by conventional care:

 

  * Diabetic distress — the exhaustion of relentless vigilance that is so often mistaken for depression.

  * Trauma and fear — the lasting imprint of a severe low, a diabetic emergency, or a frightening  

        hospitalization, and the dread of it happening again.

  * Attention and executive function — the burdens of managing a demanding illness, so easily and wrongly

        gets mistaken for irresponsibility.

  * A wounded relationship with food — the shame and secrecy that can distort eating and self-worth.

  * Families under strain — the marital and relational weight a child's diagnosis places on parents who

        become, overnight, co-managers of a chronic condition.

 

I do not treat these as malfunctions to be corrected, but as the human weight of living with a chronic condition — questions to be faced rather than symptoms to be erased. My work is to help patients and families recover meaning, dignity, and agency within the limits illness imposes, and to find their way back to connection: to one another, to purpose, and to a life larger than the disease.

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I have been providing psychotherapy since 1998. I earned a master's degree in Family Sociology and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology. I'm also a tenured Psychology Professor at St. Petersburg College. I'm the author of several books, both fiction and nonfiction.​

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My services are provided through telethearapy only in those states I am licensed in, which include FL, ID, NH, NM, and PA. 

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